Trump, Gates and Climate Change

The 30^th Conference of Parties (COP 30) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is scheduled to be held in Brazil from November 10 to November 25. It is significant that Microsoft Company’s founder Bill Gates who is one of the world’s great innovators and philanthropists has just come out with a public document advocating a radically different approach to curtail and manage anthropogenic climate change. Unlike Trump who believes that climate change is a hoax and has adopted policies which have thrown the idea of limiting green-house gases emissions into the dust bin, Gates does take climate change ‘seriously’ but wants a re-orientation of the ways of tackling the issue. His views therefore demand attention even if some of them are disappointing and will add to climate change.

Before proceeding further one point needs to be made. Trump has immediately used Gates views to post on his social media platform Truth Social “I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!”. This may be a distortion of Gates views. He should have been aware though that Trump will use them to press ahead even more purposefully with policies and activities which ignore the emission of green-house gases. This will include going for greater extraction of hydrocarbons in the US and their use not only in the US but worldwide. The US is today the world’s largest producer of hydrocarbons-based energy and is vigorously promoting its exports. This is dangerous because there is an inextricable linkage between green-house gas emissions and rising temperatures which are causing havoc in the world.

Gates begins his current thesis on climate change by asserting “Climate change is serious, but we’ve made great progress. We need to keep backing the breakthroughs that will help the world reach zero emissions. But we can’t cut funding for health and development—programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change—to do it. It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries”.

Thereafter Gates goes on to reject the ‘doomsday’ view on climate change. In other words he now feels that it does not pose an existential crisis for humanity. As he puts it the doomsday view of climate change is “In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us—just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature”. He opines on this view thus “Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise”.

It is particularly disappointing that Gates accepts that climate change will have the gravest impact on poor countries but nowhere does he advocate that the advanced and rich world needs to fulfil the basic pledges it took, beginning with the early 1990s, to not only limit its green-house gas emissions but also help poor countries to adapt to climate change and take steps to mitigate its consequences. Indeed, this writer would wish to once again reiterate that the entire history of the advanced world’s approach to climate change is littered with broken pledges and prevarications. Gates ignores all this entirely and goes on to propound three new truths.

These are “(1) climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization; (2) temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate; and (3) health and prosperity are the best defence against climate change”.

In reducing the significance of climate change from an existential crisis for humanity to “a serious problem” Gates has either deliberately or unwittingly opened the door to politicians and policy makers in the advanced world, which bears the historical responsibility of anthropogenic climate change, to abandon any responsibility to the poorer countries on this issue. Gates has gone to great lengths to argue that technological changes will limit the emission of green-house gases through breakthroughs in the area of clean energy. That will be the basis of greener processes in the other sectors—manufacturing, agriculture, transportation and construction—which are responsible for global warming. Even if this is true the question is whether the advanced countries will be willing to share their breakthrough technologies with the developing world as they pledged three decades ago and since then have abandoned them. Indeed their attempt has been to have the world forget the basic cause of anthropogenic climate change and shift the onus of controlling it also on developing countries. This can only result in the perpetuation of their poverty and a greater disparity between the advanced and the poor countries. Naturally, this has to be rejected outright by countries like India.

Till now the bedrock of climate change efforts has been to control a rise in global temperatures. This is because they are directly linked to green-house gas emissions. By seeking to change the focus of climate change efforts away from this criterion Gates proposals will only unleash what Trump wants—more and more hydrocarbons use. That will be very dangerous for the world.

There is no doubt that Gates will be now the hero of the MAGA movement. What a transformation!